"Sharp, quirky, and occasionally nettlesome", Walking the Berkshires is my personal blog, an eclectic weaving of human narrative, natural history, and other personal passions with the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills as both its backdrop and point of departure. I am interested in how land and people, past and present manifest in the broader landscape and social fabric of our communities. The opinions I express here are mine alone. Never had ads, never will.

October 01, 2005

"As I Lay Planning": If William Faulkner Wrote the Berkshires Conservation Vision (with apologies to the Master)

Because now, the sons of those fathers who could no more refuse their yearly fieldstone crop prooffered by hoarfrost and that yet remembered Laurentine, paleolithic press of ice than refrain from Sisyphean wallpiling their course rocky debris, as if the Merino would not (as surely they must) succumb to a final murrain and the now fruitless fields return (as surely they must also) to this three times forest, where that first and greatest wood and banshee catamount keen have passed from knowledge of the -not dead- living, save the unvanquished blighted chestnut roots dreaming still of receded canopies beyond grasp or clear recall of that time when the sky was shared with tanagers and the pulse of stars; these sons whose backs no longer stoop for sherds and spearpoints among the furrows, whose hardpressed feet now on clutch and accellerator no more barefoot stride hornyheeled intruders in the dust of country roads that yet bear the family name like thedarkstreaked boneyard marble among the tattered flags in the dust of ancestral plots above the graybeard veterans of ’76 and the nameless young, so that of these only the family names endure and all the accumulated strata of their livelihoods (bearpaw snowshoes, Borden’s pails and hope chests) pass as antiques with Gotham mark-ups for second home furnishing or to that breed of bed and breakfast serving rose-tinted whimsey and the simplicity of that never simple rural character along with crème fraiche and truffe oil in place of honest, cast-iron farmfare yokerunning with hamsteaks to speed their weary bones (dry, now, in their six feet of good Berkshire earth) to labor; and because the rain pours down in quicksilver born of distant fossil fuel, and the unprotesting maple poplar birchwood forest feels the stronger heat ofgreenhouse summer sunlight in August and the boreal pull of cross-boundary Canada urging heartwood northward if only they, as the sons of farmers sons forsaking their patrimony with excavators and cellular towers at the doorstep, could uproot and seek better fortune.

Care to have a go? Although the subject matter is too esoteric for me to submit this essay as an entry in the Faux Faulkner Contest, there's no reason why you shouldn't have at it yourselves. Fans of Papa can submit to the Imitation Hemingway contest through the same link.